Every Man Alone, A Phoenix
Young John Donne
John Donne: The Reformed Soul, a Biography by John Stubbs. W W Norton & Co., 2008. 592 pages.
For every man alone thinks he hath got/ To be a phoenix, and that there can be/ None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
—John Donne, An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary
Psychologically, it seems (despite all evidence to the contrary) that we live in the Age of Reconciliation. Unity and balance are central to our ideals. Lovers stay together, or split only to rejoin; children spend their lives with therapists who reconcile them to their parents’ mistakes; we try to reconcile our passions with the reality of our day jobs and our illicit desires with our values. This spirit is not new, or all-encompassing. Still, there have been times when individuals were defined by the strained conversation between chasms in conscience and community, art and patron, lusts and prayers; a time when psychic conflict was understood as a potentially productive, rather than destructive, energy. Arguably, no poet—perhaps no person—in the history of Western literature embodies the creative and vital nature of personal contradiction more than John Donne. In John Donne: The Reformed Soul, John Stubbs confidently lays out the biographical details (or, as Donne might say, an anatomy) of his life. More to the point, Stubbs offers a convincing psychological portrait, and the effect is a book that is deeply moving and startling in its scope.
In the course of his life, Donne metamorphosed from a libidinous and love-struck poet to the intimidating dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, making it difficult to create a cohesive narrative. He was a poet and priest, but he was also a sailor and captain of a fleet ensnarled in the ongoing diplomatic tiffs between England and Spain, off and on from 1596-1598. He then was appointed the secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton. Before both of those occupations, he became well-versed in the law as a scholar at the Inns of Court. Suffice to say, his life was complex enough to deter even the most ambitious biographer. Stubbs wisely resists the urge to offer conjecture as to the biographical intent of those poems for which it would be especially precarious, and the bulk of the biography appropriately hinges on the hundreds of letters Donne sent to various friends and patrons.
Here is what those letters tell us, more or less: his life, which spanned from 1572-1631, was hardly less intricate than a fugue, and remarkable to the point of disbelief. He was forced to leave Oxford some time before he was sixteen, unwilling to sign the requisite Oath of Allegiance to the Queen and the Reformed Church. The son of an ironmonger, he spent much of his life pursuing two related goals: a higher social position than that of his birth, and protection against the martyrdom his family had experienced repeatedly as Catholics in an intolerant Protestant England. Donne came from a long line of Papists; Sir Thomas More was his maternal great-great-grandfather. More, as Chancellor to Henry VIII, had been responsible for the deaths of many Protestants via public burning; he was rewarded for his “protection” of Henry VIII with a beheading. One imagines that it was in part this legacy that made Donne’s mother refuse to relinquish Catholicism, even to the point of exile. Donne’s brother Henry died after being tortured and thrown in prison for harboring a Catholic priest. To give us a sense of the nature of punishments for being a Papist sympathizer, Stubbs relates this gruesome tale: while Henry languished in prison, the priest was condemned to death; upon being brought to the scaffold, one of the men responsible for his sentence cried out “thou didst say the Queen was a tyrant!” To which the priest, using some of his last breaths, shouted back that he had never done so, “but I say you are a tyrant and a bloodsucker.” He was unsuccessfully hanged and then publicly disemboweled and his intestines set on fire while the dying man watched. Decades later Donne would write, as one of the only important men in his time to decry torture as unchristian, “I haue seene at some Executions of Trayterous Priests, some bystanders pray to him whose body lay there dead”; it is not impossible that Donne would have been there to witness the gruesome death of his brother’s friend.
Painful as it may be, the anecdote is useful in understanding the context for Donne’s conversion. He began to waver in his conviction that the Catholic Church was worth dying for, and began to question those who would martyr themselves for (what increasingly seemed) superficial differences in worship. After his brother died, destitute and miserable in London’s oldest and most plague-prone prison, Donne didn’t dig in his heels and retaliate bravely against Protestant England. Instead, he began building a life that would in some ways be defined by an exhausting balance of watchfulness, hard work and capitulation.
His submissiveness to his patrons and the state was exacerbated by what his first biographer would describe as the one “remarkable error of his life”: he married for love. While serving as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, he met and fell deeply in love with the 16-year-old daughter of his boss. Stubbs writes: “At times [Donne] saw their love as beginning with a gradual coalescence of feeling: at others it stemmed from one decisive moment, their ‘first strange and fatall interview.’ Either way, it was undoable.” They eloped, violating both canon and civil law. Demonstrating how lasting (and widespread) the controversy over their marriage was, Stubbs cites from A Choice Banquet of Witty Jests, Rare Fancies, and Pleasant Novels (1665): “decades later a joke about the furtive couple’s situation was still in circulation. According to one version, it began with Donne himself, at a moment of high exertion or anxiety: ‘Doctor Donne after he was married to a Maid, whose name was Anne, in a frolick (on his Wedding day) chalkt this on the back-side of his Kitchin-door, John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.” Donne’s anxiety was no paranoia; Ann’s father was influential and furious, and had Donne briefly imprisoned. Donne (not the hearty sort, it seems) soon became ill and was released.
It would take him the rest of his life to pacify Ann’s father, and redeem his reputation with the elite employers of London. In the meantime, he and Ann did much lovemaking—she spent virtually the rest of her own life pregnant, bearing twelve children. Five of these children died, however (three of them in one year, so that Donne, devastated, laments to his friend that he has no money for a proper funeral, but hasn’t it in him to bury them himself). Ann herself died in childbirth at the age of thirty-three. Of the children who lived, Stubbs focuses on three: Constance, who was companion to her father until her marriage; George, the eldest and brightest son, was a solider (and tragically, a hostage in a prison in Spain when Donne died, after unsuccessful attempts to get his son released). Last there is infamous young John Donne, who would become his first and unfortunate editor. Though himself a type of clergyman, the young John seems to have been an “atheistical buffoon,” and cruel: he beat a child who ran in front of his horse so severely that the child died two weeks later. Barely escaping imprisonment, he went on to collect and publish his father’s work, with varying degrees of responsibility, for his own monetary benefit. Lost in this process was a series of essays and commentaries on some 1500 authors.
The relationship between Ann and John seems to be the one relatively comfortable and happy aspect of Donne’s life. Donne’s letters to his best friend and confidante Goodyer seem to indicate that, other than general exhaustion, he and Ann were unusually devoted to each other, a fact made all the more unusual when you consider that marriages at the time were rarely more than financial affairs. In many ways, his sermons after her death seem to be conversations with God intended to replace his conversations and devotion to Ann. As young parents, they scraped by in a number of ways; Donne wrote epithalamions (wedding poems), elegies and occasional commendations for various patrons. It is difficult to understand how a man of his talent could want for work, particularly because London encompassed a virtual constellation of literary greats. Donne was an avid playgoer as a young man, and it is unlikely he was not an acquaintance of Shakespeare; his daughter Constance would eventually marry the actor most favored by Christopher Marlowe, the first man to play Tamburlaine. He worked with philosopher Francis Bacon (a friend married Bacon’s niece); a close friend, Magdalen, was the mother of young poet George Herbert, who would decades later be joined with Donne as one of the so-called Metaphysical poets. He was in an informal literary-drinking-and-merriment club with playwright Ben Jonson, who memorialized the friendship with characteristic snarkiness years later: “Done’s (poetry, in part) was profane and full of blasphemies...(and) for not keeping of accent, (he) deserved hanging.” He was, Jonson conceded, “the first poet in the world in some things” but his work steadily declined in quality after the age of twenty-five. Finally, that “Done himself, for not being understood, would perish.”
Unfortunately, then (as now), the life of a poet didn’t pay so well. As his family grew, they went deeper into poverty. Personally, Donne was a man of infinite insecurities, in constant flux, so much so that he likened this aspect of his psyche to the torture method du jour. In a late sermon he wrote:
It were a strange ambitious patience in any man, to be content to be racked every day, in hope to be an inch or two taller at last: so is it for me, to think to be a dram or two wiser, by hearkening all jealousies, and doubts, and distractions, and perplexities, that arise in my Bosom, or in my Family; which is the rack and torture of the soul. A spirit of contradiction may be of use in the greatest Counsels... But a spirit of contradiction in mine own Bosome, to be able to conclude nothing, determine nothing, not in my Religion, not in my Manners, but occasionally, and upon Emergencies; this is a sickly complexion... a shrew and ill-presaging Crisis.
A man like this needed a few steady things in his life; one of them was consistent employment.
It was a stubborn (and in some ways inconvenient) admirer, King James, who elicited Donne’s eventual ordination by effectively blocking other employment until he acquiesced. Donne felt he had no right to a religious life. He was uneasy about everything—his past, his friendships, familial obligations, lust, ethics, God. It is no wonder: illness and schism shaped everything throughout Donne’s life. London strained against two unceasing tempests in particular: the plague and religious controversy (generally, a widespread conviction that those holding onto their Catholic faith were necessarily traitors to the Court). Donne’s preoccupation with death was not unduly morbid, but rather uncommonly apropos for his day. People were searching for divine explanations for the sickness, war, injustice, bewildering torture, public executions, all of which drenched the city in a stinking bath of infestation and blood. London swarmed with the antics of a grieving, frantic population convinced that any day they would awaken to bubonic sores that signaled their last earthly week.
Donne acknowledged the terror of annihilation, and offered a soothing (if stern) guide to God’s favor. This is presumably what King James had seen in Donne as a potential priest, when he argued that no one would take him seriously as a religious man. He was known as the poet and fool who married for love, he said. This is partly true. His poems were heralded, and censured, as rhetorically virtuosic, wrenchingly romantic, coming from a man who flagrantly disregarded traditional poetic meter and had a spectacular sex life. Like so many, Donne had written to woo, and he really meant it. Consider this sly entreaty in “The Flea”: “And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; / Thou know’st that this cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, / Yet this enjoys before it woo, / And pampered swells with one blood made of two, / And this, alas, is more than we would do.” More scholarly is “The Canonization”: “We can die by it, if not live by love, / And if unfit for tombs and hearse / Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; / And if not piece of chronicle we prove, / We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; / As well a well-wrought urn becomes / The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs, / And by these hymns, all shall approve / Us canonized for Love.” The speaker here chastises his mistress for withholding sex in favor of “well-wrought” poetry and the “pretty rooms” of a sonnet. As death would later replace his obsessions with the sensual pleasures of the body, here the sensual pleasures are prioritized over the lyric.
Because the poems were lacerating to his conscience, he had always limited their distribution, circulating them only among friends. Contemporary readers like T.S. Eliot would celebrate his early poems as singularly frank and complex, but they cast a sinful shadow over his life. The one time he came close to publishing them it was decades later, and he divided them into three piles representing the Catholic model of the afterlife. His love poems, he wrote to his close friend Goodyer, would be burned , “condemned by me to Hell.” Others—presumably the most explicitly sexual ones—were “virgins (save that they have been handled by many)’ which would be sent to ‘utter annihilation (a fate with which God does not threaten even the wickedest of sinners).’” By then, Donne had become increasingly fervent in his belief that sex equaled sin; Ann had died in childbirth (the infant girl lived barely minutes) and in his grief he radically dissociated from self-identity as a lover and husband. Around that unfortunate time, he was invited to speak at the wedding of a friend’s daughter. He disconcertingly announced: “Mariage is but a continuall fornication sealed with an oath,” later adding (as if that wasn’t wet blanket enough): “There is not a more uncomely, a poorer thing, then to love a Wife like a Mistresse.” He was reportedly a passionate and unusually vulnerable preacher, who one could find (as Walton reported) “weeping sometimes for his Auditory, sometimes with them: alwayes preaching to himself, like an Angel from a cloud, but in none...” At this stage Donne seems to have been a sort of Orpheus, trying to resist the urge to turn but failing, looking behind to his love and youth, thus eternally severing himself from his past. Eventually he would become more comfortable with his public life.
Due in part to a fear of how he would be remembered (suitor or priest), he prepared for posterity as adroitly as he composed his poems or sermons. His death was preceded by various false-starts and formal acknowledgments. During the heights of the plague, Donne left for the country, fearful of infection. The townspeople speculated that he had passed. When he got word of his own eulogies, he good-naturedly commented: “A man would almost be content to die... to hear of so much sorrow, and so much testimony from good men, as I...did upon the report of my death.” His last sermon is widely regarded as his elegy for himself. Stubbs notes that “there is surely no other poet who orchestrated his death so meticulously” and it seems that the sermon was his last opportunity to define his legacy. Donne wrote in a letter, “...it hath been my desire that I might die in the Pulpit; if not, that I may take my death in the Pulpit; that is, die the sooner by occasion of my former labours.” The sermon was austere and forlorn, rendering transparent his effort to reconcile two dove-tailing emotions: death was annihilation, or death was a joyous reconciliation with God and Ann. He hoped the latter was true, and he experienced a gnawing sense of guilt for his fear of the former.
Donne had an ambivalent relationship to solitude, which likely informed his confused feelings about death. As a brilliant and ambitious scholar working endlessly in a household full of children, he must have craved, even desperately at times, time alone. At the same time, his letters make clear his friendships were very dear to him. He also had a deeply religious conviction that it was sinful to hide from the world, famously writing “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe...And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” Donne suffered deeply for his inability to reconcile himself: those “jealousies, and doubts, and distractions, and perplexities,” the vacillations about religion, his hedonistic past turning to a conviction that lust was sin, and finally, the artistic conundrum of wanting to disappear from the world and wanting to be squarely in it, with magnifying glass in hand. Yet it was his very susceptibility to doubt, his inability to unify himself, that made him what he was. Despite his early years as a swaggering suitor and innovative poet, one imagines Donne during his later life as a wincing dog, shrinking from the chaos of the streets and clashes between divinity and loyalty. In Holy Sonnet XIV he cries: “Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You / As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.” We must be forced to recognize truth, because try as we might, we will always be vacillating, hesitant, and circumspect with God.
Ultimately, Donne secured both a higher social standing and protection for him and his family through unimaginable caution, and by converting. As dean of St. Paul’s, he made a few half-hearted attempts to massage the rift between the Catholic church of his youth and the Protestant one he adopted. But it was his flexibility that allowed him to survive. He reacted to danger not by going boldly forth into the fire of exploding violence and martyring allegiances that plagued the day; instead, Donne leaned a bit back, surveyed the scene, and his meditations on what he saw became his “fatal interview” with God. In the final weeks of his life, Stubbs tells us, he once more turned the chasm within himself into art. His doctor ominously suggested that Donne begin work on a monument of himself for St. Paul’s. Donne responded in characteristically grandiose, yet profoundly self-abnegating fashion: he came up with a design that depicted him—and thus required him to pose as—a corpse wrapped in the traditional funeral shroud, framed within the silhouette of a funereal urn. It was completed before his death on March 31, 1631, and in the interim, he genially requested it be hung above his bed.
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